There's a fine line between going through the motions on a formulaic movie and hitting your marks in the honorable course of serving up a decent genre picture.
"16 Blocks," the first film in several years from action specialist Richard Donner, initially looks to be a rehash of the too-familiar. A SWAT team crashes through the door of a dumpy, upper-story apartment where a shellshocked cat is the only living thing in residence. Perhaps a dope deal has gone sour; perhaps a gang of miscreants has turned upon one another. It doesn't really matter, because although bloody bodies lie strewn about the floor, the scene has nothing to do with the movie that's about to unreel. Its only function is to define the miserable state to which the movie's central character has fallen in the eyes of the police department and himself. Somebody has to sit watch over the crime scene until the forensics types arrive. Somebody otherwise useless. Somebody useless, period. Cue Jack Mosley.
And cut to a parody of an auspicious grand entrance. The camera's looking out the apartment door, just about floor level (the cat's perspective, though he's boogied by now). Into the shimmer of smutty light in the stairwell rises the shambling figure of veteran police detective Mosley - and by all means of Bruce Willis, looking terminally wasted and 10 years older than the last time we saw him. The shot cannily operates on two wavelengths simultaneously: as straight, if overstated, characterization of what a crummy, callused, booze-befogged waste of protoplasm Mosley has become; and as ironical, Pirandellian in-joke on Willis' tarnished image as a movie star, an action star, with a raft of bad movies on his résumé and a hapless, tabloid-fodder private life to boot.
Jack Mosley's long, ignoble workday should end with his corpse-sitting duty. But back at the precinct house, a harried superior foists an overtime assignment on him. Somebody has to escort a petty criminal - Eddie Bunker (Mos Def), who happens to be the lone witness to a serious crime - across a mile or so of Lower East Side Gotham in order that he may testify before a grand jury. Bone tired, protesting and needing a drink, Mosley sets out on the mission. You know before you buy your ticket at the box office that the titular 16 blocks will somehow become a life-and-death battleground, and that, this being a Bruce Willis movie, Jack will have to find the mettle to be a hero.
The happy surprise is that director Donner, in whose filmography clinkers way outnumber winners, finds the mettle to make the mission worthwhile. The good stuff kicks in about the time Jack, his ear jangled by Eddie's nonstop nattering, pulls up at a favorite watering-hole for a nip. Eddie he leaves cuffed in the locked car, where the wit' is almost immediately at the mercy of a gun-toting assassin. Perhaps more than one assassin, as Jack soon realizes in a crossfire moment whose visual coverage and hair's-breadth editing verge on the exquisite in their precision and economy. This is one of those times when an embattled cop calls for backup - only the guys Eddie is to testify against are rogue cops, and the "backup" is deadly.
Donner is the guy who made the "Lethal Weapon" movies, which I happen to loathe. Thousands don't, so you may or may not be heartened to hear that, essentially, "16 Blocks" has little in common with them. In place of hi-tech spectacle (aerial gunships, cars literally shot from cannons), the movie keeps its feet on the ground. The 16 blocks aren't counted off with the rigorousness one might have wished for, but the screenplay gratifyingly unfolds in real time: the grand jury's term expires in less than two hours, so Eddie must not only be kept alive but transported to the courthouse on Centre Street by the appointed hour.
In the course of the journey, Jack and Eddie form a credible bond. Mosley's decision to stand by his charge even as his old cronies have committed to killing him means that his own life is on the line as well. But this is no a-man's-gotta-do-what-a-man's-gotta-do heroism on Mosley's part and, any of several ways, it's going to cost him. Willis plays the role from the inside out, establishing without a hint of false rhetoric or late-blooming moralism that his character's soul is at stake. Mos Def - by far the subtlest performer to make the transition from hip-hop to riveting movie acting - is a worthy partner, and the duet they play bears scant resemblance to the shuck-and-jive so broadly indulged by Mel Gibson and Danny Glover in the "Lethal Weapon"s. It's more like a variation on the edgy, two-hander dynamics between Gibson and Julia Roberts in Donner's underrated paranoid thriller "Conspiracy Theory."
There are other noteworthy presences. David Zayas, ex-New York cop turned actor who came on strong in HBO's prison series "Oz," supplies one of the formidable obstacles in our heroes' path. But top dog in the menace department is Mosley's old partner, a master of affable realpolitik played by David Morse, erstwhile sweet-faced giant of TV's "St. Elsewhere." We know from the outset not to trust the partner, no matter how soothing his blandishments when he arrives on the scene, because there is, after all, a familiar formula at play here (and because Morse was the guy in "12 Monkeys" who brought about the end of the world, smiling that pale moon smile of his). But we enjoy not trusting him. "16 Blocks" is honest work.[[In-content Ad]]
